History and Demographics of the Irish Coming to America

History and Demographics of the Irish Coming to America

From The Peopling of New York City: Irish Communities

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Contents

The Forgotten Era

When people think of Irish immigration in the United States, the first thing that comes to mind is the 19th century wave of Irish immigrants that came to America due to devastating effects of the Famous Potato Blight of the mid 1840’s. What many people fail to recall is so called “forgotten era” of Irish-American history, or the first wave of Irish Protestant and Catholic immigrants that started coming since the early 18th century. Until the 1840’s, as long as Protestants held the majority, Irish immigrants were simply classified as Irish. It was not until more Irish Catholics came in the second wave of immigration that the first wave wanted to separate from the newcomers and therefore they distinguished themselves as Scotch-Irish. Now, the term “Irish” is synonymous with Irish Catholic.

Reasons for Immigrating

Religious Oppression and Social Upheaval

In 1690, Protestant William of Orange defeated Catholic James II in the Battle of the Boyne for control over the English, Scottish, and Irish kingdoms. King William’s victory established the base for continued Protestant supremacy in Ireland and sealed the Catholic faith as inferior, even when they held the majority in the land. The established Church of Ireland was a Anglican establishment that ruled Ulster, a northern province of Ireland. The Anglican elite wanted to enforced strict religious conformity so they passed the Penal Laws, a series of laws that discriminated against Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters. These laws curbed the growth and power of the Presbyterian and Catholic churches by closing their churches and schools, prohibiting their clergy to officiate weddings or funerals, outlawing Catholic schools, and banning priests and bishops from Ireland. The laws also stripped the Irish Catholics of their rights by not allowing them to buy land, vote, practice law, attend school, possess weapons, or hold government office. They were prohibited from marrying Protestants, excluded from the professions (except medicine) and also forced to pay tithes to the Protestant Church. These laws greatly limited the Catholic population of land, civil rights, and positions of influence. Looking for freedom from religious discrimination, many decided to immigrate to America.

Economic Distress

Though religious oppression was a significant factor in driving the Irish desire to immigrate, the economic distress in Ireland was the main factor that propelled many of the Ulster Irish to leave their homeland. The first exodus took place from 1718 to 1729 because of biannual crop failures. Though not as devastating as the Great Irish Potato Famine of the mid 1800’s, these famines still caused as many as 480,000 deaths. Not only were the crops failing, but also rent was rising at alarming rates because land was scarce and valuable. Landlords practiced “rent-racking”, a method in which they raised rent when the lease on a tenant’s land is expired. With such bad harvests, people were unable to keep up with the rising rent rates and the standard of living decreased. Also, the linen industry in Ireland was collapsing due to a decrease in English demand and an increase in competition with other manufacturing countries.

Because of all these economic downturns, the Irish turned to America, where they thought there would be no rents and no lack of affordable land. A reason that the Irish chose to immigrate to America rather than to another country is because the two countries had already established good transatlantic trade relations. For years, there was successful flaxseed trade between Ireland and Philadelphia and New York. Many positive letters were sent back, giving people accounts of the cheap and abundant land, favorable treatment, better lifestyles, and the ability to practice one’s own religion without many restrictions. Still, not many Catholics immigrated because they were more oriented to Catholic Europe than Protestant America and they viewed immigration as exile from their Gaelic culture.

Where The First Wave Settled

The majority of Irish immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, mainly because of the religious tolerance established by state’s founder Quaker William Penn. This appealed to the Irish Presbyterians in particular. In 1790, there were 100,000 Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania, one-fourth of the total Irish immigrant population. The city’s location was close to ports and favorable land grants. New York’s location along the Hudson River also made it an ideal port and settlement area because it had access to the Atlantic Ocean. This is one of the reasons why New York seconded Pennsylvania with the largest Irish immigrant population. Many of the Irish that came from Ulster came as indentured servants, meaning they were bound by contract to serve colonial masters for four years in exchange for food, clothes, lodging and financing their passage to the New World. In the 1740’s, nine out of ten indentured servants in Pennsylvania were Irish. These port cities were also home to many Irish merchants, lawyers, professionals as well as artisans and shopkeepers. By 1800, twelve percent of the city’s population was Irish born. The Irish also settled along the frontier throughout the Appalachian region from Pennsylvania to Georgia and Kentucky to Tennessee. These immigrants make up almost fifty percent of the white population, making this area greater in Irish culture than in Philadelphia and New York.

The Second Wave

Later in the 19th century came the second wave of Irish immigrants to America. This mass immigration was due to numerous reasons, one being the horrific potato famine that swept across the country of Ireland. The English introduced the potato to Ireland in the 16th century in one variety. This particular type of potato proved to be susceptible to fungus, because later in 1845 an unknown fungus struck the Irish fields and killed the crops. During the time of the famine, 3 million people in Ireland depended on the potatoes for their daily existence, and every meal consisted of potatoes. There were numerous amounts of deaths, but there is no clear record of the exact number of deaths from the Potato Famine since members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) destroyed most church records in 1922. The estimates range from 500,000 to 1.5 million deaths due to starvation. Between 1845 and 1860 nearly 2 million people boarded vessels that took them to the American shores. As America grew by the masses of immigrants flooding their ports, Ireland lost a communal culture, an ancient language (Gaelic) and its way of life altogether. Famine, death and immigration reduced Ireland’s population from 8.1 million in 1840 to 6.5 million ten years later in 1850. Aside from the death and devastation of the Great Famine; which caused millions of Irish natives to depart from their homeland, there was another reason for the mass immigration; assisted emigration from landowners.

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Where They Moved

The first wave of Irish immigrants (those who arrived between the years of colonization up until the 1840s) settled mainly in Maryland (a Catholic colony), East New Jersey, and South Carolina. Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s settled mainly in coastal states such as New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, but also in western states such as Illinois and Ohio. In New York City, the Irish population was concentrated mostly in Lower Manhattan, in neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, and most prominently the multiethnic Lower East Side, specifically in the “Little Ireland” part. In the late 19th century, this neighborhood boasted more Irish residents than Dublin. The infamous Five Points neighborhood of the Lower East Side, named for the five-pointed intersection of Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets, was known for its rampant crime and fierce battles between nativist and Irish gangs, as immortalized in the book The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury and the Martin Scorsese film that the book inspired. Most of these neighborhoods consisted of tenement houses – crowded living quarters built with the intention of housing as many immigrants as possible. The unbearable living conditions that the Irish immigrants endured in these tenements include poor ventilation and lighting, filthy shared outhouses (later bathrooms) for which there were long waits, basements filled with stagnant water or trash or both, not to mention the small rooms in which large families were packed. In these tenement houses disease spread like wildfire. As the Irish population achieved upward social mobility, they began to move into other parts of the city. They moved into northern neighborhoods of Manhattan, like Yorkville, Washington Heights, and Inwood, as well as new districts in the Bronx like Mott Haven, Fordham, and Morrisania, and Brooklyn neighborhoods of Prospect Park, Marine Park, and Gerritsen Beach.

What Jobs They Had

The Irish arrived in America during a time of industrialization and change. The jobs that they took often took advantage of that fact. Because many of these newly arrived immigrants were uneducated, they sought unskilled work. Many Irish found work upstate New York working on the Erie Canal and other canal projects in the area. By 1818 there were 3,000 Irish immigrants working on the Erie Canal, with a total of 5,000 Irish immigrants working on four separate canal projects in 1826. The labor that Irish men were practically forced into, by either desperate situations or deceitful recruiters, was often both exhausting and dangerous. This was certainly the case in the aforementioned example of canal work, but also in building railroads and coalmining. A common saying regarding the work on the railroads was that there was an “Irishman buried under every tie.” And the coalmines, located largely in Pennsylvania, were without proper safety regulations or even suitable ventilation. All this is on top of the fact that these jobs paid very little to begin with. The average wage for unskilled jobs during the 1840s was 75 cents a day, with most laborers working each day for ten or twelve hours. But most Irish men found jobs close to the port where they landed, like New York City. These immigrants took unskilled jobs such as cleaning yards and stables, pushing carts, unloading ships and other dockhand jobs, or working as carpenter’s assistants, or boat-builders. They also worked in and ran factories, with dangerous conditions no better than those working in railroads or coalmines. Along with railroads and canals, Irish immigrants in New York City built streets, houses, and sewer systems. They also found work in the service industry as bartenders and waiters. But it must not be forgotten that for Irish immigrants these jobs were not easy to come by. The Irish were the victims of intense and open discrimination, being blamed for economic troubles and the depression of wages. As a result, Irishmen faced commonplace job discrimination, with many job posters and newspaper classifieds ending with the phrase, “No Irish Need Apply.” Where the Irish immigrants found work ultimately determined where they would live. Most of the Irish settled close to the coast, so that they could be within walking distance of their jobs on the docks. Factory workers naturally settled close to the factories. Those working on canals and railroads often saved their money in order to buy land next to the route on which they worked. This was especially the case in upstate New York and Illinois, and would explain the heavy concentration of Irish people living in those regions today. Men were not the only Irish immigrants that worked – women also needed to find jobs because of the low wages and dire economic circumstances that Irish immigrants faced. They too worked in factories, particularly in the garment industry. These factories, like the ones that the men worked in, were often cramped, dirty, and dangerous. These jobs, which consisted mainly of making cotton shirts, were also low paying. Mid-nineteenth century women might get paid 6 to 10 cents per shirt, working for thirteen or fourteen hours each day. Generally this was enough time to make only nine shirts a week, which resulted in a maximum payment of 90 cents a week. But most nineteenth century Irish women in New York City found jobs in the service industry, becoming chamber maids, cooks, and caretakers for wealthy families on Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. The one benefit from these jobs was that they allowed immigrant women, to some extent, to enjoy higher standards of living than they could hope to obtain. But these service jobs were largely avoided by native-born New Yorkers. They were seen by Americans as degrading, the general sentiment being expressed in the common statement: “Let Negroes be servants, and if not Negroes, let Irishmen fill their place.” This saying not only illustrates the view of native-born Americans on service jobs, but also the poor relations between African Americans and the Irish. Irish immigrants had to compete mainly with newly freed slaves and other African Americans for the low-end, unskilled labor jobs that other Americans did not want. The tension between these two ethnic groups in New York City surfaced during the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Although this insurrection (which mostly involved Irish immigrants) was in response to the Civil War drafts, it was also used as an excuse to lash out against New York’s black population. It ended with at least eighteen African Americans murdered, countless more injured, and $5,000,000 in property destroyed - including a black orphanage. Although New York’s Irish population showed extreme aversion to the war during the New York Draft Riots, a great amount of Irish found employment as Union soldiers during the Civil War, with many of them being conscripted into service right after coming off the boat. The all-Irish 69th New York Regiment, also known as the “Fighting Irish” fought in historic battles such as those at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg. They are notable for having more combat dead than any other Union army infantry regiment, as well as having over a hundred Medals of Honor. They were highly regarded for their bravery and dependability.